Six Seven One
by TEi Has Pants
Summary: Drabble. A year has passed, and the pain hasn't stopped...focuses on Anthony following his part in the game. Oneshot, complete.


**Title:** _Six-Seven-One_

**Fandom:** Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

**Rating:** R, for Zombie stuff and sickening attention to detail.

**Word Count:** 698

**Timeline:** 1 year following the end of Anthony's storyline in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (815 A.D.)

**Summary:** A year has passed, and the pain won't stop...

**Author's Note:** This shit is pretty gruesome! The faint of heart (and the faint of butt), I forewarn you, and heed my words well: you may vomit. Just hope your will to read decent zombie-drabble is strong enough to overcome the nausea. **YOU HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED. :)**… that was my original disclaimer, anyway, but I wasn't posting to an Eternal Darkness-based area at the time. I'm sure you ED:SR readers can handle this. I also tried very hard to do Cam Clarke's voicework justice, even though it's told from the third person with no dialogue…

---

A year has passed, and the pain won't stop.

Like clockwork—every ten minutes--a flash of seething, corrosive, yellow burning would burst from the core of his body and wash over him. All he could do at this point was seize a little each time and groan, his muscles atrophied, his voice too far gone to produce a scream.

He barely moved anymore. His flesh--once a healthy, peach color what seemed like centuries ago--had turned pale, eventually taking on the same faded white color of the chalk the Sisters used when educating children in the teachings of the Lord. In the past few weeks, the white had given way to a sicklier--deathlier--brown tinge that started at his fingertips and had moved its way up the backs of his hands until it disappeared in his sleeves.

Part of him hoped against the odds that the brown color stopped just at the wrists, where the fabric met his rotten flesh. But the rest of him—the _dead_ part of him—knew better. He could feel his skin shriveling and hardening against the muscle and bone, and he felt it in his legs as well. He wasn't sure which scared him more; the fact that his eyelids had long since decayed unto disuse and he could no longer keep these images out, or the fact that more of him seemed to..._accept_ this wretched fate.

And he was always _hungry_. He would have settled for a nice, hot meal...but as time wore on, the meals he craved became hotter. Steaming. Living...he fought that urge with every ounce in his being. Giving into it would allow him the power to shamble around again; it would also mean sacrificing himself to the rot.

And just on time, the burning pain overcame him—he wriggled, groaned—and eventually lay still again. The stench of his own rot no longer affected him—he couldn't smell. He tried not to focus on the inside of his mouth as a matter of principal; he couldn't see as well anymore, either, and in fact could no longer see at all out of one eye (his only comfort was that maybe he'd finally be able to shut out the image of his own gnarled, pockmarked hands through the blessing of blindness).

His hearing, however—that remained sharp. Just beyond the heavy wooden door that had barred him in when he was still strong enough to move on his own free will, he could hear people shuffling about, praying under their breaths...the hymns...the psalms...things he had once enjoyed and now laid a world apart from. He had damned himself the moment he laid hands on the Tome of Eternal Darkness, and even then, even if he could make his way back out to the church...his grotesque sight would repulse all around.

But that was another thing. The Tome of Eternal Darkness had shown him many things and had led him to this room, disappearing upon his collapse. And of all the images that had flitted through his head...

...maybe there wasn't a God. There couldn't be, after the madness he experienced in the chuch's catacombs. A place of holy worship, reduced to a playground for devils and shuffling, lumbering corpses...? Those aside from himself, even.

It was all just too much to take in. He felt...recessed from himself. And it was with a shock that he realized the yellow pain had moved from simply affecting his body.

It was eating away at his head.

He didn't know how much longer he'd hold out, this living corpse, this curse, this abomination. The hunger _would_ overtake him when there was nothing left for him to resist with.

---

It would take six hundred and seventy-one years for somebody to find his room and end his life; by that point, his brain had long since decomposed into nothingness, leaving him as mindless and hungry for flesh as those he had slain in the catacombs. But perhaps...perhaps he was saved, at least partially, by the monk who finally gave him rest; for, even as a repelling monster, the monk had kneeled by his broken corpse and prayed for his soul.


End file.
